10 Video Games That Trick You Into Playing The Villain

10. Braid

Jonathan Blow's indie hit Braid was one of the cornerstone titles of the indie game revolution, an expertly designed puzzle-platformer in which player character Tim attempts to rescue a princess who has apparently been kidnapped by a horrible monster.

A self-reflexive riff on the conventions of the genre - especially Mario, clearly - Braid is best defined by its novel inclusion of time-manipulation mechanics, which play a major role in the game's own manipulation of the player.

In Braid's final level, everything apart from Tim himself plays in reverse, appearing to show the princess escaping from a knight while working with Tim to avoid obstacles on her way home.

Except of course, when time reverts forwards, it's revealed that the princess is really running from Tim, who is the monster himself, while the knight is actually the real hero.

This was a masterful subversion of both the game's established mechanics and also the seemingly prototypical "save the princess" narrative gamers have been conditioned to expect for literally decades.